


all hallowed

by thishazeleyeddemon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gay stuff is happening it's just one's dead and the other has issues so no one's aware of it, Ghost Adam, Halloween, Human Michael (Supernatural), If you're worried there'll be a detailed list of potential triggers in the notes at the bottom, M/M, Past Abuse, Pre-Slash, Psychological Trauma, it's all spooky and soft and melancholy okay I actually put work into this one!! I think it's good!!, so uhhh, there's actually a limit to how much I want to tag because spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27384055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thishazeleyeddemon/pseuds/thishazeleyeddemon
Summary: It’s impossible to describe what Halloween feels like if you’re dead.Adam’s fairly sure it didn’t feel like anything, before. Oh sure, he remembers being excited for it, eagerly munching on candy, insisting on staying up too late to go see the Halloween parade, his mom insisting on letting him have a costume even though those were time-consuming to make and horribly expensive to buy. It was like a fun, macabre game that the world played. The only reason why it wasn’t his favorite holiday, he remembers, is because the only holiday Kate Milligan got off was Christmas.It hadn’t been anything more than that, before. If he had been away from people, away from calendars, Halloween could have passed without him knowing.But now, he sits in the garden of the old house, watching as a breeze he can’t feel stirs the grass and flowers all around him, and he thinks that even if he was far away from everyone, locked away from the sun with no way to discern the passage of time, he would be able to tell when Halloween was approaching.
Relationships: Michael & Adam Milligan, Michael & Adam Milligan & Their Pet Cat, Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	all hallowed

**Author's Note:**

> I legit got the inspiration for this On Halloween so we're just gonna ignore that it's late huh. I didn't edit this a lot but I like it! I hope y'all like this. I'm hoping it's just melancholy and eerie and not depressing

It’s impossible to describe what Halloween feels like if you’re dead.

Adam’s fairly sure it didn’t feel like anything, before. Oh sure, he remembers being excited for it, eagerly munching on candy, insisting on staying up too late to go see the Halloween parade, his mom insisting on letting him have a costume even though those were time-consuming to make and horribly expensive to buy. It was like a fun, macabre game that the world played. The only reason why it wasn’t his favorite holiday, he remembers, is because the only holiday Kate Milligan got off was Christmas.

It hadn’t been anything more than that, before. If he had been away from people, away from calendars, Halloween could have passed without him knowing.

But now, he sits in the garden of the old house, watching as a breeze he can’t feel stirs the grass and flowers all around him, and he thinks that even if he was far away from everyone, locked away from the sun with no way to discern the passage of time, he would be able to tell when Halloween was approaching.

Time is a little odd, for the dead. He can watch clocks move and the sun raise or lower in the sky, but he has no internal sense of time passing, the way living folk do. It’s easy to forget, to let it slip out of his fingers while he watches a bee crawl over the petals of one of the roses, while overhead the wind starts to pick up, gray clouds following in the distance. It’s easy to just sit, and exist, and let the world change around him.

Some changes demanded his attention, though. This house...by the laws of the living, it hadn’t been his in a very long time. There were papers somewhere that listed who this house was supposed to belong to, signed in night-dark ink and paid for with money that looked different than when he was young. But the laws of the dead were not the laws of the living, and this is the house that Adam’s mother worked her fingers to the bone to let him live in, that he had his first kiss in, the house he helped decorate, where he studied for university, where he -

\- anyway. By the laws of the dead, laws that are far older and less flighty than those of the living, it’s his house, and that means he feels it as soon as the gate is opened and the car pulls into the driveway. It’s enough of a shock to jolt him out of the quiet haze it’s _so_ easy to drift into, and he pulls himself up, a grin already tugging at his lips.

Michael’s back.

The other man is already getting out of the car when Adam appears next to him. Adam can tell that he’s been noticed before Michael actually raises his head from how Michael startles at the rush of cold air that Adam’s been told signifies his presence, goosebumps rising on his exposed arms.

Adam is always cold, these days, cold like he has veins of ice water, the lightless cold of being outside what the sun can touch. There’s only one real thing he’s found that alleviates it, and Michael is already smiling at him, arms raised to give him it.

Michael is strong. Adam can’t feel his grip properly, but he can feel the pressure at least as Michael embraces him tight. As always, Michael’s living touch is fever-bright, a rush of warmth like standing next to an open furnace, like holding a piece of the sun. If Adam’s not mistaken, he seems brighter than usual, a steadier, campfire burn instead of an uncertain, candlewick flicker. Michael’s face seems to prove it when Adam pulls back, keeping his hands on Michael’s shoulders. The dark shadows under his eyes have receded, and he seems far less pale and wan than before. There’s tension in the line of his shoulders, but not much; he looks good, healthy, alive.

“Good on you, you finally don’t look dead,” Adam says. “Did your sister finally make you eat more than an apple or something once a day?”

Michael snorts. “I eat more than that,” he says. He’s still holding Adam as well, the warmth of his hands like two brands in Adam’s skin. “But yes, Raphael did make sure to feed me. Gabriel tried to sneak me Twizzlers whenever she wasn’t looking.”

“Sounds good,” Adam notes, ignoring that he isn’t sure what a Twizzler is and wouldn’t be able to recognize one if it was shown to him. “How long were you gone?”

A different living person might have taken offense at that, but Michael understood. Not even just because Adam had explained before how time slipped through his fingers like water when he was alone – Michael knew for himself how sometimes, the days could get away from you and weeks could pass without you knowing.

“Three days,” Michael answers. Oh, that’s not so long. That’s what Adam thought it was too. Michael steps back then, and Adam has to stop himself from chasing the contact (not just because of Michael’s living heat). He turns, heading to the trunk of the car, calling behind him, “You can go wait inside if you want, I just need to get my stuff out.”

Even that is a bit of a foreign notion, these days. Adam has very few needs now, but that his house remains standing and he isn’t alone. Adam is little more than cold wind and cobwebs these days; he has very few things that are his. “Alright,” he says, and vanishes back indoors.

It’s not a total dusty mess after three days with no occupants; Adam isn’t totally useless (and it’s easier to affect the house when no one’s around). The countertops aren’t dusty, any lights Michael had left on were turned off to save power (a notion Adam is very familiar with, having been the recipient of multiple lectures on the topic when he was young). Their cat has food and water too; a cat cares little if the human she sees is living or dead, only that her dishes are filled on schedule. She meows at Adam when he reappears, and knocks her little head against his hand when he reaches out to pet her. The little flicker of her life is different from Michael’s, but not in a way Adam could explain; he picks the little tortoiseshell up carefully and cradles her in his arms as he scratches her ears, feeling like he’s picked up a glowing ember from a fireplace.

That’s what he calls her, Ember. Michael generally calls her Cat or You, as in, “Where’s the goddamn cat now?” or “Get off of there, you!”

Ember’s ears prick up when she hears the door open, but she doesn’t struggle to get down from Adam’s arms until Michael walks up to the two of them, arms free of the luggage he would need to live three days somewhere else. Michael laughs and holds out his arms for her; Adam smiles and lets her jump from him to Michael. She settles into his arms, purring. It sounds a little like a crackling flame.

They sit like that for a little while. Adam feels the house start to open up again, the walls remembering what it’s like to hold someone inside of them. Michael relaxes minutely, stiffness bleeding out of him as Ember purrs and kneads dough on his chest, her tiny paws flexing.

“How was it here?’ he says abruptly. His voice is still a little like that sometimes, a little stiff and awkward and unused to speech. Sometimes Adam thinks if he could, he wouldn’t talk at all.

“Oh, fine,” Adam shrugs, trying to remember the last few days. Being alone makes it all blend together, into dust and starlight and the rush of wind. It wasn’t something he minded until Michael moved in. “I just watched Ember and the gardens, mostly. It was boring without you, though.”

Michael smiles, a little soft, a little hesitant. Adam’s heard what his siblings say to him sometimes, knows he doesn’t really go anywhere anymore but here and to their houses. Perhaps he’s not used to being called interesting.

He steps forward, so he can lean against Michael, feeling that sunburst flare in him again. Michael relaxes again, shifting his weight ever so slightly so he’s leaning into Adam’s touch.

That’s new too – the living (the few members of it that entered this house after Adam and before Michael) thought he was too cold, too much like touching something made of dry leaves, of soap bubbles and decay. Michael is fine with touching him, though. Adam still doesn’t know why.

“How was Raphael’s?” he asks instead. He’s never met the lady, not properly, but she’s come to the house once or twice. He hid in the walls while she was here, but he remembers her well – short with her big eyes and dark skin and long hair pulled back into a cascade of braids, clever and knowledgeable and affectionate in the rough way siblings, even adopted siblings, seem to have. She’s the one whose name is on the deed to the house, not Michael. She’s a doctor now, apparently, wanting to help people after everything. He thinks, in another life or in a life at all, they would have been friends.

Michael shrugs, gently. So as to not jostle Ember. “It was fine. Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Adam echoes. That can be a bad sign, with Michael; Michael, he’s found, will downplay everything no matter the actual severity of his problem. He hates to seem weak, hates to seem like he can’t take everything that happens to him. Adam thinks it would have seemed silly to him before he died, and it seems sillier now; of course you can’t take everything that comes your way. He thinks his current state is a good example.

Michael shrugs again, noncommittal. “We made Halloween decorations. Gabriel wanted to carve his pumpkin in, ah...”

“I can guess,” Adam says wryly. He’s never met Gabriel properly either, and Michael’s gone to visit him instead of the man coming here, but Adam’s heard stories. “What did Raphael do?”

“She told him if he didn’t stop she was going to break the pumpkin over his skull.” Michael’s voice is dry. Adam stifles a giggle.

“So sounds like business as usual for them, then,” he says. Michael is still a bit tense, and Adam decides not to pursue it right now; Michael will share when he’s ready. “What are we doing for Halloween?”

“Do ghosts celebrate Halloween?” Michael sounds honestly curious.

“In different ways.” Ember starts to struggle to get down. Michael kneels as he lowers her down carefully, scratching her behind the ears once more before letting her go. She darts away into the shadows of the house, probably to go sleep on Michael’s pillow again. Michael straightens up, his knees cracking a little as he does. Adam waits until he’s standing and facing him again before he continues. “Everyone, every sort of ghost has their own way, but everyone does celebrate it. It’s kind of important.”

“Everyone?” Michael tilts his head, a curl of dark hair falling in front of one eye. It’s the sort of thing that probably would have caught his attention more when he was alive, and more if he was a different sort of ghost, but now Adam’s appreciation feels a little abstract. Separate, far away from himself. “Even ghosts who didn’t celebrate it when they were alive?”

“What can I say? Even if you don’t believe in Halloween, Halloween believes in you.” In truth Adam doesn’t understand it that well himself – he hasn’t left this house, these grounds since he died, and death doesn’t automatically grant you access to the secrets of the universe. What he knows he’s gleaned from the few ghosts to come up to the edge of the gardens or sit on the roof to speak to him, and he isn’t sure where the truth is in what he learned from them. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; it’s not like he’ll be leaving to look for himself anytime soon. “So do you want to celebrate? Carve a few more pumpkins or something?”

Michael, to his credit, takes the time to consider it. He considers everything like that, quiet and contemplative until the moment he decides to act. “I think so. I’d rather get a fake pumpkin though, my hands still feel sticky.” He flexed his hands to punctuate his statement. “Raphael can help us get more Halloween decorations, but I’m not sure what else people do for Halloween.”

“Do they still have Halloween parades?” Adam frowned.

“We don’t live that close to the center of town,” Michael pointed out. “Even if we did they probably wouldn’t come by here.”

“Do we...” Adam pressed his palms to his face. “Going door to door for candy? Is that a thing children still do?”

“It’s called trick-or-treating.” Michael leaned into Adam for a moment before stepping away to go to the kitchen. Adam heard him start to rifle through the refrigerator as he called back, “I’m not sure anyone will come to our house, though. Apparently people think it’s creepy.”

“Almost as if it’s haunted or something,” Adam says lightly, and hears Michael’s laughter echo full and bright.

The rest of the day after that disappears into a haze of Halloween planning. Michael’s taste in decorations seems to run far more towards the elegant than Adam’s, thinking more of things that make it look like there are eyes looking out from their windows, styrofoam tombstones, machines that make fog and eerie lights in green and yellow, purple and orange. Adam sees the fake severed limbs, the skulls, bloody clowns and mechanical dolls that will lunge if you get too close to them in the online catalogue (not getting close enough to touch in case he damages the expensive computer; it had still been a marvel to him that you could have one without having the size of the machine fill the whole room) and is enthralled.

“What would we even do with plastic arms? Toss them all over the yard?” Michael huffs. He isn’t truly upset, though – Adam could tell if he was.

“We could have them sticking out of the ground,” Adam offers. “Line them up by those tombstones so it looks like someone’s trying to get out.” A thought occurs to him, and he grins. “Maybe we could get a blank tombstone and write ‘Adam Milligan’ on it.”

“That’s ghoulish.” Michael looks like he isn’t sure if he’s allowed to laugh or not.

“No, think about it.” Adam gestures as he talks; the less he thinks about it, the more these old motions come easy to him. Thinking too much seems to make some part of him recall that their days of instincts written into neuron and synapse are behind them, and then he looks like a marionette when he tries to move like a living man. “The gravestone says my name, right? The kids come up to the house, and they see me with you, but I just stand in the back and I don’t say anything. If anyone mentions me, you can say “what man?” or “That’s my friend Adam,”, and then I just vanish -”

“We could get in trouble,” Michael points out. “Especially if anyone tells anyone in my...old line of work about the haunted house on the hill.” He adds a bit of a sarcastic flare to the last part of the sentence, but Adam can hear it – he doesn’t like the idea. It worries him.

As well it might. Adam is quieter now, stiller than he was when he was alive, like the flat surface of a cool pond, but he still boils at the thought of Michael’s old “line of work”, as he puts it; that man had no right to put Michael in danger. Right now, though, they are deep in the house, Ember sleeping at Michael’s feet, He shrugs.

“Then I’ll just sit in the tree and throw candy at them,” he says.

Michael laughs. He laughs differently when he’s comfortable, a low, strong laugh like the ringing of a church bell. He sounds good. Adam is still cold – he’s always cold – but he thinks for one faint second that he feels warm.

Once they’ve argued their way into a rough agreement (Michael finally being argued into a _little_ bit of proper gory nonsense in the form of a zombie figure to sit by the front gate), Michael goes to shower and start getting ready to sleep. Adam does neither now, of course, but the ritual is vaguely comforting. Michael lives by the cycle of the sun (or is trying to. Even now, years later, sleep still often escapes him) and it means the days are marked, instead of disappearing into an arbitrary haze of light and dark. It’s one of the things Adam has adjusted to with Michael’s presence – time matters again, the boxes on a calendar and numbers on a clock once again having real meaning.

It’s enough to make a man feel alive again, Adam thinks dryly, and shuts the door to the bathroom. Even now Michael still forgets he’s allowed to, that no one will stop him here.

He’s playing with Ember when Michael comes out. She’s hiding under their coffee table and swiping at his hands as he pokes them through the wood. She keeps looking confused when her paws go through his hands. Sometimes Adam wonders what Ember thinks of him; does she know he’s dead or does she think that Michael simply lives with someone she can only sometimes touch?

Michael smiles when he sees them and sits down on the couch by them, reaching out to cup the back of Adam’s neck for just a moment before pulling his hand back. The sudden fire makes Adam jump; it’s overwhelming as always, but he wants to chase it.

“Hello to you too,” he says instead. “How are you feeling?”

Michael doesn’t answer immediately. His gaze is shadowed; calm as he watches Adam and Ember, but full of dark things under the surface. He looks tired, to Adam’s eyes. Anything beyond that is beyond Adam’s ability to divine; once he would have known, once he was very perceptive to the moods of others, but he’s out of sync now, disconnected from how emotions influence the carriage of a body, the set of a face. He waits, instead. Michael will tell him if he wants him to know.

“Lucifer came to Raphael’s house yesterday,” Michael says. He says it flat, without inflection, as if he’s holding it away from him to take away the impact.

Adam straightens up, eyes wide. He’s never met this sibling either, but what he’s heard about this one -

“He came to _her house?”_ He tries to imagine what he would do if Lucifer tried to come to his house, tried to walk up his driveway, knock on his door and bother ~~his~~ Michael. He doesn’t want to follow the stories of haunted houses that other ghosts have written, but what he’s heard of Lucifer Shurley, Hunter Morningstar, makes it tempting. “What the fuck did he want?”

Michael shrugs again, turning his face away. Retreating is a common habit for him still. It’s not like he could talk to anyone before. Adam scratches Ember’s little head again before appearing in front of Michael. Michael doesn’t start anymore when he steps like that. His eyes flick up to Adam and away again.

“Hey,” Adam says, kneeling down. “Talk to me?” And then he waits. Adam was much more impatient before he died. If nothing else, he’s learned to wait.

It doesn’t take long. Michael sighs, turns his face back to him and holds out his arms.

They end up sitting together, legs pressed together. Adam thinks he might have found this awkward, before, but this is his friend. This feels natural for them, and nothing else matters. Ember comes out from under the table and climbs over Adam to sit on Michael. He’s not quite corporeal to her and she unsheathes her claws on reflex as she does, a natural attempt to avoid slipping. He feels nothing.

“I don’t know what he wanted,” Michael says slowly. He talks like he has to carefully etch the words out in stone, like if he doesn’t go slowly, they’ll slip out of his hands, be too hard to understand. “He left once Gabriel threatened to stab him.”

“What did he say?” Michael’s life is bright against Adam’s fingers, a steady, fiery pulse.

Michael breathes out. He sounds tired. “Nothing he hasn’t said before. Stuff about Father, the hospital ward, you know.”

Adam squeezes his shoulder. It doesn’t feel like he exerts a lot of pressure. He vaguely remembers that it’s important for people to have physical contact with others. He rather doubts he counts at this point, that holding the cold, ethereal fog that makes up his body now is the same as holding a living man. But he’s here, more here than he was when Michael moved into his house, and that’s something. Maybe that’s enough.

Michael still calls Charles Shurley Father. It makes sense, it’s been less than a year since Raphael got him out (and brought him, if unintentionally, to Adam). He needs time to adjust.

Adam doesn’t have to like it.

“He’s an asshole,” Adam says instead.

That actually startles a laugh out of Michael. It’s a little weak, but it’s there. He looks at Adam and smiles, a tad mischievously. “You used words like that back then, old man?” It’s nothing more than friendly teasing (especially since Michael _knows_ Adam swears like a sailor; he even got his mouth washed out with soap for it once), but it’s still miles beyond what Michael was capable of even six months ago.

He’s still alive. He can still change, and grow, and get better. He’s not stuck as one thing forever, not stuck in one place forever – not as one of Shurley’s “children”, not in a ward when the strain of that finally got too much, not as the thin, pale-faced wraith that had almost haunted this house as much as Adam the first few months after Raphael dropped him on Adam’s doorstep. He can be anyone and go anywhere, and he’s here with Adam.

If Adam still had a heart, it would be full. “You want me to start calling you a bluenose or something, _kid_?” he says, poking Michael’s side. Michael’s older than he ever got to be, but that’s part of why it’s funny.

“What does that mean?” Michael snickers, hitting away Adam’s hands. Ember meows as his motion jostles her. Michael quiets, stroking the curve of her spine until she relaxes again.

“I still feel like I’m doing something wrong,” he said softly.

“How so?”

Michael strokes Ember again. The cat purrs, shifting her position to get more comfortable. “Like...this is something I’m not allowed. Like I don’t deserve it.”

“You live alone in an old house with a cat and a ghost,” Adam points out, for the sake of some perspective.

Michael throws a pillow at him. Adam, who had been concentrating himself into corporeality for the sake of poking Michael, gets hit full in the face. He wasn’t clumsy when he was alive, but physicality is somewhat unnatural now and the momentum knocks him off the couch, the pillow ending up somewhere in his stomach when the surprise makes him lose his grip.

“Ouch,” he says, after a beat.

Michael snorts, curling up farther into the couch’s back. Adam drifts up after him, picking up the pillow and handing it back. Michael tucks it behind his head.

They sit there for a moment in silence. Adam weighs different options, different choices of what he could say.

“You know,” he says eventually, “I couldn’t do that before you got here.”

Michael tilts his head, looking at him quizzically. “Do what?”

Adam waves his hands. “You know. Pick things up. Interact with stuff. Much of anything at all, really.” Ember looks up at him and chirps. Adam tries to mimic the sound back to her, scratches her tiny head. “I guess I wasn’t much of anything at all, really.”

Michael stirs, sits up straighter. Adam can hear the indignation in his voice when he says, “You’re always something.”

“But that’s the thing – I _wasn’t.”_ Adam struggles for a moment, wondering how to explain. “I’m not being self-deprecating. I was just...part of the house, the gardens, the wind… I couldn’t really pick things up because I barely remembered what having hands was _like._ I didn’t remember anything but that this was my house and no one else should be here.”

“That explains the plate,” Michael snorts, rubbing at a spot on his forehead.

Adam doesn’t flush, because he can’t, but he has the distinct sense memory that he should. “Sorry about that again.”

“You already said that, it’s fine. Go on?” Michael is looking at him quite intently.

“Right.” Adam hesitates, wondering how to put it. “There were other people, who tried to live here before you. You know that.They didn’t...” He doesn’t like talking about it, what he did, what he could have done so easily in his drifting if they hadn’t left so quickly. “They never really tried to talk to me, not properly. The ones who did...”

“I’ve seen Gabriel’s ghost-hunting shows,” Michael says. “I can guess.”

Adam can’t help but smile for a moment, still amused at the notion of a monster-hunter who likes to watch movies of people pretending to do his job.

Both Gabriel and Lucifer continued the work that Charles Shurley tried to impress on them, the eternal hunting of the supernatural. They do it for vastly different reasons.

“No one ever talked to me like a person,” he says. “No one ever tried to explain who they were, why they were in my house, anything that was going on. No one wanted to talk to me like a person _._ ”

“I did,” Michael protests. “I introduced myself and everything.”

Adam gives him a long, flat stare. It takes only a brief moment before understanding dawns.

“Ah,” he says. “That’s your point, then?”

Adam holds the stare for another beat before smiling. “Yes,” he says, and takes Michael’s hand. Michael looks down, his cheeks turning red, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You helped me remember that I was real,” Adam tells him. “That there was a world outside of here. So -” he falters suddenly, words escaping him. “Don’t tell yourself that you don’t deserve things, okay? And fuck Lucifer, whatever he said. And fuck Shurley, too. They don’t know anything. Um.”

Michael’s face is still flushed, but his eyes are soft. “Thank you,” he says.

“I mean it.” Nothing feels urgent anymore, but this – perhaps this is the ghost of what that felt like. “You don’t -” He stumbles helplessly. “You’re _important.”_ Nothing is supposed to be important to him anymore but the house. It’s still true. “You’re important to me.”

Michael falters, his eyes wide. His gaze pierces into Adam. His eyes are a very vivid green – somewhere in Michael’s bloodline was a shard of emerald.

For a moment, the world feels still, sharp, like the air before a thunderstorm.

Then a smile crosses Michael’s face like the rising sun, and he squeezes Adam’s hand, fire sparking through Adam at the contact. “You’re absolutely ridiculous,” Michael informs him, and his voice is so fond as to take any potential sting from his words. “You’re important to me too.”

Maybe that’s not a good thing – maybe Adam is a dusty relic locked in a basement and forgotten, maybe he’s all cold water and a dream forgotten in the morning, maybe Michael should be living with someone who’s all there more than half the time.

Maybe some part of Adam is more alive than he thinks, because he can’t bring himself to pull away.

~****~

“Excuse me, who’s _that?”_

Adam looks down at the child’s voice. They are a tiny thing of indeterminate gender, for whatever reason dressed in a pickle costume. Their face sticks out the front. Adam chalks it up to more nonsense of the modern day and waves. The child does not seem reassured.

“Hmm?” Michael is holding an orange bowl with bats stamped around the sides. It was bought at Adam’s suggestion. Michael hates it. Ember has kicked it across the floor more than once. Gabriel loves it. It’s filled with candy.

It’s a fine Halloween night. Adam can’t judge the temperature, obviously, but no one seems to be shivering. The sky is clear except for a few scattered wisps of cloud, giving a perfect view of the stars shining down from above. The moon is full and fat, the whole night lit up grey from its reflected light. A breeze blows leaves through the air. It’s a perfect night for ghosts to sit on rooftops and enjoy the view.

Michael makes eye contact with him. He looks a little exasperated. Adam grins at him, leaning his head back against his roof. It’s not like Michael can get him off.

Michael holds his gaze for another moment, before turning back to the child. “I don’t see anyone?”

Adam presses his hand over his mouth to not burst into laughter.

The child seems thoroughly discomfited by this. They give Adam another glance, gaze uncertain. Adam softens his expression. He can’t really control things the way some ghosts can, but this is Halloween, their new year, and he’s as strong as he ever is. Blowing some leaves to a child isn’t much of a task.

The child’s eyes go wide. They catch one of the leaves and look down at it, and back up. When they look back up at the roof, he’s nowhere to be seen.

Their protestations follow their group all the way back down to the street. Michael watches them go.

Ember’s meows jolt him out of his reverie. He turns, only for Adam to shove her in his face. Ember, heedless of his startled yelp, rubs her face against his.

“Happy Halloween,” Adam chirps.

“Bastard,” Michael mutters, but there’s little venom behind it.

Adam sets Ember down. She meows, before turning and running back into the house. Adam smiles, before coming to join Michael at the door. For a long moment, neither of them says anything.

“You didn’t answer me,” Michael says abruptly.

Adam turns to him. “Hm?”

Michael looks to him. He looks good – but it’s hard to do a vampire costume wrong. His hair is slicked back – Gabriel’s idea – and he has a red shirt and little fangs that went over his real canines.

His siblings came by a few days ago to help him decorate. He fought them on it, of course, he’s the most prideful person living or dead Adam has ever met, but they convinced him in the end. It looks good – Raphael has a sense of style that’s pretty close to Michael’s, and Gabriel has a sense of the dramatic that’s close to Adam’s. Their combined efforts are impressive. Adam especially like the spiders.

Michael did too. He actually looked excited for Halloween, but there’s worry creasing the lines of his forehead now.

“You never told me what ghosts do for Halloween,” he says. “Is there something you want to do?”

Adam tilts his head, thinks about the question.

There’s a lot that ghosts can do. A lot of it is stuff that living folk will never see – a lot of it is not safe for the living or the dead. Some of it is, though, of course – carnivals where the sun never rises, the All Hallow’s feast...or so Adam has heard. It’s not like he’s ever been, of course.

Above, the moon is so bright. Even half outside, the warm light of the house painting his face in a chiaroscuro of shadow, Michael’s eyes are so, so green.

“Nah,” he hears himself say. He holds out a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael places his hand in his. “I’ve got what I need.”

**Author's Note:**

> Potential triggers:
> 
> Mention of past cult stuff, mention of forced institutionalization, mention of general trauma nonsense (insomnia and such). Adam is dead and although he wouldn't consider himself to be suffering, he is basically always disassociating/losing time/disconnected from his own feelings, and while it's not quite the same, it's close enough to depression to merit a warning imo. 
> 
> OKAY JESUS how was this one?? I was trying some new things, how was it!


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